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THE N YORKER, FEBRUARY 17 & 24, 2014
Franco, has sold fewer than five thousand.
(Amazon claims to have sold many more
copies of these titles as e-books.) In the
past year, Amazon Publishing has barely
been a presence at auctions, and several
editors have departed; last month, Kirsh-
baum left the company, having failed at
the task Amazon gave him. The new
publisher, Daphne Durham, has spent
her entire career at Amazon, and will re-
main in Seattle. Grandinetti, keeping his
game face on, told me, "Amazon Publish-
ing is off to a very good start."
There was a practical reason for the
failure. Hardcover copies were printed
and distributed in a partnership with
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, under an
imprint called New Harvest, with Ama-
zon's name missing from the spine. But
bookstores weren't fooled. Barnes &
Noble and nearly all the independents re-
fused to stock its books---why help their
mortal enemy?---and none of the titles
gained enough momentum to force the
stores to relent.
What's more, in its hurry to show up
New York publishers, Amazon didn't
seem to know what it was doing. "There
are certain things it takes to be a pub-
lisher," the head of one New York house
said, hardly concealing his Schaden-
freude. "You have to have luck, but you
also have to have judgment, discernment.
I have no sense of the character of their
house. . . . We care more than they do.
Bezos has moved on to diapers and jew-
elry---we're still doing books."
A former Amazon employee who
worked in the Kindle division said that
few of his colleagues in Seattle had a real
interest in books: "You never heard peo-
ple say, 'Hey, what are you reading?' Ev-
eryone there is so engineering-oriented.
They don't know how to talk to novelists."
The marketing executive pointed out that
Amazon is a fast-moving company, but
publishing is slow. "It's like the difference
between trolling and fly-fishing," he said.
"Book publishing is a very human
business, and Amazon is driven by algo-
rithms and scale," Sargent told me. When
a house gets behind a new book, "well
over two hundred people are pushing your
book all over the place, handing it to peo-
ple, talking about it. A mass of humans,
all in one place, generating tremendous
energy---that's the magic potion of pub-
lishing. . . . That's pretty hard to replicate
in Amazon's publishing world, where
they have hundreds of thousands of titles."
Amazon's entry into publishing has
created an awkward divide, giving some
book people a second or a third chance in
an imperilled industry while tainting
them in the eyes of others. The literary
agent, contemplating the future of the ed-
itors currently at Amazon, said, "You'd
have to consider the time you spent with
Vichy when you're looking for work after
the occupation." Benjamin Anastas, a
novelist who couldn't find an American
publisher for his third book, told a friend
that he was going to publish his fourth, a
memoir called "Too Good to Be True,"
with Amazon. The friend, a novelist who
had once worked at Harcourt---the house
that distributed Amazon's hardcover edi-
tions---looked stricken. "You do that," she
said, and walked away. Anastas found the
reaction hypocritical. "If you're publishing
with Penguin Random House, what's the
difference?" he said. "They're both these
massive entities that have totally changed
book publishing. There is nothing more
demoralizing for a writer than to go into
one of these huge towers to talk about
your book amid all this product. You feel
like a sperm-oil salesman at the Petro-
leum Club." Still, finding no copies of his
new book in most stores was akin to
watching himself disappear, and Anastas
said that he would think twice before
publishing with Amazon again.
Jon Fine, an intellectual-property law-
yer, worked as Knopf 's in-house counsel
until Amazon hired him, in 2005. Since
2008, he's been the company's director of
author-and-publisher relations---"trying
to get publishers to hate Amazon less," as
an arts manager said. In March, 2009,
Slate criticized Amazon for its miserly
philanthropy, especially in the Seattle arts
world, saying that certain lemonade
stands were more generous. Fine showed
the article around, and the next day a
printed copy came back to him, with "Fix
This" scrawled across the page in Bezos's
hand, and a budget of roughly a million
dollars attached. (Amazon denies this.)
Every year, Fine distributes grants of
twenty-five thousand dollars, on aver-
age, to dozens of hard-up literary organi-
zations. Beneficiaries include the PEN
American Center, the Loft Literary
Center, in Minneapolis, and the maga-
zine Poets & Writers. "For Amazon, it's
the cost of doing business, like criminal
penalties for banks," the arts manager
said, suggesting that the money keeps
potential critics quiet. Like liberal Dem-
ocrats taking Wall Street campaign con-
tributions, the nonprofits don't advertise
the grants. When the Best Translated
Book Award received money from Am-
azon, Dennis Johnson, of Melville House,
which had received the prize that year,
announced that his firm would no longer
compete for it. "Every translator in Amer-
ica wrote me saying I was a son of a bitch,"
Johnson said. A few nonprofit heads pri-
vately told him, "I wanted to speak out,
but I might have taken four thousand
dollars from them, too." A year later, at
the Associated Writing Programs con-
ference, Fine shook Johnson's hand, say-
ing, "I just wanted to thank you---that
was the best publicity we could have
had." (Fine denies this.)
Serious publishing is in such a dire
state that thoughtful people are defecting
to Amazon. There's a line in Robert
Stone's novel "A Flag for Sunrise" about
"a mouse so frightened it went to the cat
for love." The cat can inspire inordinate
gratitude when it lets the mouse live. "I
feel like, I get to do this!" an editor who
has joined Amazon said. "I can't believe
it---I'm still standing! I can't monitor
other people's feelings, but I can't see what
harm I'm doing."
By producing its own original work,
Amazon can sell more devices and
sign up more Prime members---a major
source of revenue. While the company
was building the Kindle, it started a dig-
ital store for streaming music and videos,
and, around the same time it launched
Amazon Publishing, it created Amazon
Studios.
The division pursued an unusual way
of producing television series, using its
strength in data collection. Amazon in-
vited writers to submit scripts on its Web
site---"an open platform for content cre-
ators," as Bill Carr, the vice-president
for digital music and video, put it. Five
thousand scripts poured in, and Amazon
chose to develop fourteen into pilots. Last
spring, Amazon put the pilots on its site,
where customers could review them and
answer a detailed questionnaire. ("Please
rate the following aspects of this show:
The humor, the characters . . . ") More
than a million customers watched. Engi-
neers also developed software, called Am-
azon Storyteller, which scriptwriters can